Redwood City is holding two meetings over the next two weeks regarding the El Camino Real Corridor Plan. At earlier meetings, many community members wanted to see a more pleasant, safe walking environment and bike lanes – if you’re interested in the transportation topics, especially consider next week Wednesday.

Tonight Wednesday Feb 22 at 7pm, RWC has a meeting of the Citizens’ Advisory Group, which will be discussing activity centers, community benefits, economic development, and small business retention.

Next week, Wednesday March 1, also at 7 pm, there will be a community workshop to discuss topics including bike lanes, on-street parking, sidewalks, crosswalks, transit, activity centers, economic development, and community benefits.

Click here for more information on the ECR plan.

Update on City Council consideration of Downtown Plan progress

Also, an update on the recent City Council meeting study session on the Downtown Specific Plan.

The Downtown Plan set detailed rules for the development of public infrastructure, housing, offices, and other types of buildings. The office category is effectively full, and the residential category is 90% full.

City Council discussed whether to update the plan to increase the cap for one or more development categories, which would need environmental review for the plan, or to keep the current plan while requiring additional developments to have separate environmental review, which would add more time and uncertainty for each individual building.

Under the plan, the allowed development is:

Residential: 2,500 net new units (375 of which must be affordable)
Office: 500,000 net new square feet
Retail: 100,000 net new square feet
Hotel: 200 net new hotel rooms

While 2,500 new residential units sounds like a lot, Redwood City has added 10,000 residents since 2010, and projections by the Association of Bay Area Governments expects another 10,000 more in the next 20 years or so.

Some speakers talked about the housing shortage and benefits of more housing; and about the welcome increase in vibrancy, while others expressed concern about the growth.

No decisions were made, with Council members differing about leaning toward updating the plan overall, which would allow more consideration of infrastructure and services to support the growth, or considering developments individually, which would slow down specific projects.

As a next step, the city will convene a stakeholder group to consider the next steps for downtown.